unseen poetry masterclass

This powerpoint has been created to encourage confidence in unseen poetry, and to teach students how to analyse and plan for the WJEC/EDUQAS unseen poetry question timings. The first five slides are resources for the class.

Slide 1 - a breakdown of each unseen poetry question - colour coded - to explain expectations from examiner, timings, what the question is asking you to do.
Slide 2 - a reminder bookmark to give students to take home to practise with at home. It has 8 key questions students should ask themselves to ensure clear and detailed answers when responding.
Slide 3 - The first poem handout with annotation boxes (colour coded). This is advisable to be printed in A3 so they have a decent amount of space to write notes in.
Slide 4 - The second poem handout - this one has the original poem and the poem they have to compare it with on- with annotation boxes (colour coded). This is advisable to be printed in A3 so they have a decent amount of space to write notes in. I normally print slide 3 and 4 back to back
Slide 5 - an optional print out slide with a breakdown of what to write in each paragraph, as well as possible sentence starters/cloze paragraphs to use.

This masterclass uses the poems ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ by Dylan Thomas and ‘Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep’ by Mary Elizabeth Frye. Slides 6,7,8 and 9 talk you and the class through how to quickly annotate with timers to keep the pace. The poem analysis is broken down into sections with written prompts to show on the board.

I have done this masterclass with all of the year 11 classes in my school (other than the weakest ability who weren’t sitting literature) and an overwhelming majority requested a second masterclass as they found it so helpful. I will upload the second masterclass to TES as well- it is the same format but different poems.

The format of the slides is really easy to edit, so you can use this repeatedly and just change the poems in the middle.